kevinschmidt wrote:

kevinschmidt wrote:
U.S. leaders say more infrastructure spending neededThe governor of America's largest state and the mayor of its largest city called on the federal government on Sunday to dramatically boost its spending on bridges, sewers, high-speed rail and other infrastructure.California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" the United States needs to spend up to $1.6 trillion to make up for decades of neglect and stay globally competitive."In order for the economy to thrive and live up to 100 percent of its potential, you need to move people and goods around very quickly, and so if that falls behind then the economy falls behind," said Schwarzenegger, a Republican.the three leaders said taxpayers would support additional infrastructure spending because it delivers tangible benefits. Breached levees in Iowa and New Orleans and the 2007 Minneapolis highway bridge collapse vividly illustrate the perils of allowing infrastructure to crumble, they said.http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE52L0TD20090322Yes, massive fiscal spending on infrastructure is the key.

The Gist of it...

Once again this morning I'm hearing the same advice from the same people who got their way for the last 30 years. George Will is still very certain that the same 'no regulation, hands off' schpiel that he and Thomas Friedman and David Brooks have always pushed, is now the answer to the problem that it caused. Friedman, who is now open to government intervention (and re-writing his own history of commentary) joins with every other tainted pundit on the left and right to agree in unison that the problem is that Obama is waiting until the 65th day of his presidency (Tuesday) to address the nation with his comprehensive plan to save the largest economy on earth from a crash that has been decades in the making.

Imagine my shock to read Friedman's last paragraph, which I believe could take the place of everything that's been said by analysts in the last two months.

T. Friedman-

"Well, help may finally be on the way: one reason we’ve been sidetracked talking about bonuses is because the big issue — the real issue — the president’s comprehensive plan to remove the toxic assets from our ailing banks, which is the key to our economic recovery, has taken a long time to hammer out. So all kinds of lesser issues and clowns have ballooned in importance and only confused people in the vacuum. Hopefully, that plan will be out by Monday, and hopefully the president will pull the country together behind it, and hopefully the lawmakers who have to approve it will remember that this is not a time for politics as usual — and that our country, alas, is not too big to fail. Hopefully ... "

Maureen Dowd is Wrong

Barack is Right:

Everybody yelling about the AIG bonus bailout can be put in one of two camps.

A. Contracts are contracts. OR B. Obama should have nixed the bonuses before giving them the money.

Both camps are wrong. The stock market was still steadily tanking when WE gave AIG their last bucket of dough. It was no time to argue, the bottom might have dropped out.

By waiting until now to pick up the fight over the bonuses Obama avoided the stock plunge while still positioning himself as a people's champion. He has now forced the far right, Limbaugh, Hannity, Boortz, CNBC etc. to show their true colors by defending the bonuses as valid and legal.

That's 'have your cake and eat it too' politics.

The Price We Pay...

Freedom V Totalitarianism

By purchasing goods from China and allowing the United States Business community to manufacture in China and export from there back to the US we are, in a very literal sense, investing in the success of Totalitarianism and in the failure of American democracy.

Every manufacturing job that we lose to China results in an American worker losing 20-50k per year in wages as they move to low paying service industry jobs (most often). The maximum that we save by purchasing low cost goods from China is a 2-3k per year. What a horrible deal. And all of the money spent on manufacturing these imported 'goods' is sent to and spent in China, instead of being spent in the US.

And look at the 'goods' we get. They are often toxic. China has practically no human rights and environmental regulations. Their totalitarian leaders treat their people like dogs. Why should we expect them to treat us any better?

The GATT deal passed by a Republican congress and signed by a selfish Democrat (Bill Clinton) represent the most traitorous act in American history. And now China is so powerful and yet so dependent upon income from selling to us, that if we try to turn back the clock they will most likely consider it an act of war. For without the income they receive from selling us everything we buy, China would become poor and their billion people would be largely jobless and threaten revolution.

The price we pay for this devil's deal signed by Clinton and the Republican Revolutionaries may well be WWIII and the loss of Japan as a free democracy and Hawaii as a state in our nation.

The greatest moment in U.S. history...

I'm white. I was born in Greenville, S.C., in 1955.

I was introduced formally to the issue of racism in America when I was 8 years old.

As I sat in the back of the all-white school bus on the way home one afternoon, I heard a chant coming from a group of kids gathered at the front of the bus around the driver.

It was a haunting sing song refrain and I distinctly remember thinking (a few seconds before I could make out the words) that whatever those kids were singing was scary.

Then the words became clear to me.

They were repeating over and over "Then***** lover's dead, the n***** lover's dead."

When I got home I found my mother had come home early from work and she and our black baby sitter Mariah were huddled together on the couch crying hysterically.

They just looked at me and shook their heads and went back to crying.

By the time I was 12 my family had moved to the Atlanta area.

My younger siblings, Steve and Audrey, and I were surprised to be told one morning by our mother June that we weren't going to school that day.

She dressed us up and we went to walk in the funeral procession of Martin Luther King.

During the eulogy a large black man reached down and picked up my little blond-haired 8-year-old brother without a word and put him on his shoulders so he could see the proceedings.

Although most white people I knew growing up in the South weren't racist, I had more than enough evidence to realize that "it was out there," and I thought I had left that all behind when I moved to Boston in 1990.

Then one day as I walked down Commonwealth Avenue , in the shadow of the giant CITGO sign, I passed an elderly black man walking the opposite way on the sidewalk.

As I nodded, a car full of young white men drove past us and shouted "n*****" in unison. As I barked "F*** you!" they retorted "n***** lover!" and sped away.

I looked back at the gentleman and said, "I'm sorry about that."

He just smiled a sad smile and said, "That's OK," and kept on walking.

Ironically, that's the only time anyone ever called me that to my face - not far from John F. Kennedy's birthplace.

I don't think America is worse than other nations in terms of racism.

In some ways you can argue that the United States is the only place racially diverse enough to be considered a true test of a society's ability to peacefully integrate different races.

Barack Obama being elected president surely doesn't mean the end of racism in America, but in my opinion - and I think that of my mother June, who passed on some years back - I believe that it is the greatest moment in the history of our country.